


sometimes you have to stop running

by Godoflaundrybaskets (digiella)



Series: running around the galaxy with half a soul [2]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-17
Updated: 2016-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-22 23:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7457485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/digiella/pseuds/Godoflaundrybaskets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post <i>A New Dawn</i>:</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>"Behira isn't with me," Kanan said, his words blurring together as he fought to say them all at once. </p>
  <p>"Behira is... What?" Hera squinted trying to make sense of what in the galaxy was going on. She didn't see Behira, sure, but the rodent deamon was particularly tiny and Hera had overlooked her before.</p>
  <p>"I mean, she's not here. She won't be coming. Or, well, she's <i>not</i> not-- I don't--" Kanan let out a shaky laugh and rubbed the back of his head ruefully. "This, uh, isn't really something I talk about a lot. I don't have a daemon. Behira never really existed."</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	sometimes you have to stop running

"Ready to go?" Hera asked grinning as Kanan edged up The Ghost's ramp. Her lekku started to droop as she noticed his pale face and twitching hands. "Is... is something wrong?"

"I..." Kanan trailed off seemingly unable to continue. He glanced back as if second thoughts plagued him. His daemon, Behira, was hiding again. The hanger was nearly empty out here in the boondocks. These agriculture worlds didn't have much, but empty hangers were something they had in plenty when the harvest wasn't in.

"Is Behira alright? Where is she? Did you two change your mind?" Hera tried to fill in Kanan's missing words. She hadn't seen him at a loss before. Not that she'd known him that long, but it still seemed... unusual.

Sadaf scrambled away from where he was fiddling with an exposed control trying to organize some of their spare wires. It was busy work but it at least was something to fiddle with. His brown fur had oil in it again she noted with irritation. She didn't suppose deamons without thumbs got any less messy at times, but Sadaf seemed to revel in the mechanics of their ship in a way she hadn't seen in any other pilots daemon. But, being small and clever had its advantages she supposed. She just wished there was a better way of keeping oil from tracking all over their ship and her _pilot suit_.

Kanan took a breath and closed his eyes. His hand twitched at his side as if he was reaching for something but after a moment he still didn't say anything. 

"Kanan? Are you alright?"

"Behira isn't with me," Kanan said, his words blurring together as he fought to say them all at once. 

"Behira is... What?" Hera squinted trying to make sense of what in the galaxy was going on. She didn't see Behira, sure, but the rodent deamon was particularly tiny and Hera had overlooked her before.

"I mean, she's not here. She won't be coming. Or, well, she's _not_ not-- I don't--" Kanan let out a shaky laugh and rubbed the back of his head ruefully. "This, uh, isn't really something I talk about a lot. I don't have a daemon. Behira never really existed."

"I don't understand. I met her. What are you...?"

"Behira, come out," Sadaf demanded, "This isn't funny!"

Kanan's hand cut through the air. "I don't _have a daemon._ " 

"Your serious." Hera felt the blood from her face drain leaving her skin a light green tint as she regarded Kanan with horror. Sadaf crawled up her cloths to curl around Hera's neck with his large ears pressed tightly back against his head. Kanan regarded them tensely looking ready to bolt if this started to go south. Hera wanted to reach out, grab Kanan's arm and make sure he was actually himself because she... wasn't sure how to process this. She needed to keep him from disappearing before she figured out... whatever she was going to do.

"I thought-" Kanan coughed looking away, emotions playing over his face: hurt, betrayed, resigned. "I thought you had realized back on Gorse."

Hera's throat felt like sandpaper but she forced herself to talk because if she didn't there wouldn't be another chance with Kanan. She had sort of come to the conclusion that he was a Jedi, sure, and not some rouge Force user. But she _hadn't_ realized _that_. How could she have missed that he was severed? She knew he had been running from the Empire and that the Jedi were hunted, but she never would have guessed that _this_ was something he was running away from.

"I did. I just- It's fine." The reassuring words and lies caught behind the rock lodged in her throat. She needed to calm down. She needed to stop staring at the place where his daemon _should have been_ but somehow, awfully, _wasn't_. 

"Look, this was a bad idea." He smiled at her. The same little smirk he had on his face when talking to the Moff of the Empire's star destroyer. Like he hadn't just- Like it didn't _matter_ that he didn't- He grabbed the small satchel, the only thing he apparently owned or cared about, and turned on his heel. 

That, at least, was enough to break her out of panicked freeze. Sadaf still sat rigidly on her shoulders but she could finally move. She lunged forward, jerking to a halt as Sadaf tugged at her lekku, silently demanding her to stop. Kanan paused for a moment at the noise his back still to her but at least he was listening. 

"Kanan, wait. Just- Give me more than half a second to understand," Hera said glaring at him. She crossed her arms, still unable to force her body get any closer. To grab him by the shoulders and shake him and ask why was he dropping this information on her out of nowhere. Make him see that this wasn't something that she could just _brush off_ like he wasn't _severed._ But, she was not going to let him just leave like that. Not... yet anyway.

"I have tea in kitchen," Hera said, wanting to buy time, "Let me have a second to think about this and have some tea with me."

"How forward, Miss Hera." He turned to face her. The smile slipped from his lips and he regarded her with a touch of trepidation in his features. "Are you sure?"

"No," Hera said bluntly trying to keep the growl out of her voice. "But I know I don't want you to just bolt after I let you see The Ghost. So, get back in here. At least for tea. And let me wrap my head around..."

She waved her hand searching for the right words.

"I'm afraid my condition is permanent," Kanan said with a twitch of his lips and a raised eyebrow. Obviously this wasn't the first time he'd dealt with this kind of reaction to his... lack of daemon. Hera didn't know what to call it. But she was unsettled that he was comfortable enough to joke about his... situation. Sadaf's fur was still puffed out. She never considered herself unexpressive person but there was something unnerving about the way that Kanan smiled and frowned and _emoted_ without a daemon. She wondered if it was just practice or if... Daemons weren't the source of your emotions exactly, she knew that, but they were your _soul_.

She'd seen the severed victims that the Empire left in its wake. There was a mass severing for so many of the non-human races that it sent shudders down her back some nights of what _could have happened_. She'd heard all the lies and propaganda that they spread about, well, the Empire tended to called the severed either demons or slaves. Kanan didn't behave like either of those. He had seemed, she hated to say it, _normal_.

Sadaf's fur slowly settled down but he put his mouth close to her ears and muttered, "I don't know, Hera. If even half of what we've heard is true, then this is a huge risk. I'm not sure we should keep him."

Hera let her hand trail over his soft fur wishing for a moment that Kanan had stayed behind like he had initially planned. As softly as she could, she replied, "There's no 'keeping'. And since when have you cared about risk?"

As they entered the kitchen, Sadaf leapt off her shoulder to the counter, standing up on his back paws and opening the cabinet to retrieve her tea stash. She heated up some water and poured two glasses for her and Kanan who sat at the table avoiding her eyes. Kanan's fingers tapped a staccato pattern on the table. The silence was heavy but she wasn't sure how to break it.

"I don't suppose you have something a little stronger than tea," Kanan asked as she set the tea cup by him. His eyes darted to the fridge before going back to studying the ceiling. Hera narrowed her eyes at him because she rather suspected that alcohol had become more that a crutch while he was working at that bar. 

"If you're going to be part of the crew then alcohol is strictly for off hours only and not during the job interview."

"I thought helping you with Gorse would meant that I passed the job interview." He quirked an eyebrow but waved away her objections before she could speak. "No, no. Just joking. I understand."

Sadaf leapt from the counter to the table and glared over at Kanan who just smiled and took a sip of his tea. Sadaf didn't continue protesting but curled around Hera's tea cup when she set it down trying to absorb all of its heat though he was careful to keep his fur away from the top. 

Hera took a deep breath. She was going to have to walk a fine line on this one. If she still wanted Kanan on her ship, then avoiding questions that would send him bolting for the door would be helpful. Sadaf was still unsettled and unlikely to be much help coming up with questions they wanted to ask, but she didn't have that much time to make her decision. 

"How were you posing with a daemon? I _met_ Behira."

Kanan shrugged sheepishly. "She's a droid and very _very_ illegal. And that was before the Empire but a bounty on any daemonless beings that weren't chipped or dead." Reaching into the small sack next to him, he drew out a small rat, black with white dappling with a long tail which was about half the size of Sadaf. Hera flinched as she saw Behira lying there dead and frozen. Kanan flicked a switch and Behira's nose twitched as she looked up at him and ran up his arm and curled up on his shoulder. "Daemon's tend think she's just shy and as long as she sticks close to me there aren't usually any problems. Plus, if I don't stick around anywhere very long no one even knows to ask any questions."

_As long as he keeps everyone well away, they'd never get close enough to realize_ , Hera thought and wondered how long it had been since someone had seen Kanan without a daemon. _He probably wouldn't have even told me if it wasn't going to become obvious in close quarters._

Kanan picked Behira - the droid - up again and flicked her off. He placed her on the tabled halfway between Hera and himself like a peace offering. Hera morbidly wanted to poke her and prove that he was lying, that this was some elaborate trick. But that thought hadn't done more than form before she sharply pulled her mind away from it. There was no way that Kanan was lying about this (what would be the point?) and if he was lying then she would be _touching another person's daemon_... She shuddered.

She extracted her tea cup out from where Sadaf was curled around it. Sadaf nosed her hand causing the tea to slosh a little bit but she took a sip trying to think of what to do next. She sighed because she knew her mind was made up even if she didn't want to admit it. If she didn't trust Kanan, she wouldn't have brought him to The Ghost. He had already stuck his neck out further with no cause other than they needed his help. The Empire would want his head if even a whisper of a daemonless being reached its ears. 

"So did the Empire...?" She trailed off, not sure how to ask.

"No. It wasn't them," Kanan said. He stared past her. She waited patiently "I don't really talk about it often." He said finally.

She barked out a surprise laugh spilling the tea. "I'm really not shocked by that."

"It's not like whatever you're thinking. It was different back then. The- The people who taught me... Th-They..." He growled as he tried to force the words out and Hera couldn't stop a small flinch. He put his hand on the table and pressed down such that his knuckles started turning white. So softly that she almost missed it, he muttered, "I don't know what I was expecting. I need to leave."

She had already guessed that he was part of the Jedi but what she knew of the group was put together from rumors, her father's stories, and banned holovids. She hadn't expected-- She had always assumed that them being daemonless was just another lie the Empire spread after their eradication. To find out _that_ piece, of all things, was true... was a shock.

"Kanan, stop." She sighed and set the tea down and looked levelly at Kanan, ignoring the way that Sadaf approached the rat-droid and nosed at it. She could keep prodding him with questions, because she _burned_ with curiosity and horror, but Kanan was half ready to bolt already. If she kept prodding, she was going to lose him completely.

More than any of that, though, was the realization that she _did not_ want him to leave.

There would be time later to figure this out. She knew she could work with him, that he was skilled, and would be an incredible asset, but that was only if she didn't scare him off. Her lips twitched as she tried to keep the smile off her face; after all, once they were in hyperspace she would have all the time in the galaxy to satisfy her curiosity without Kanan bolting. 

Taking a calming breath, Hera said, "Look, I _am_ a little shocked. You're going to have to give me some time to adjust. But I _do_ want you on my crew." She glanced down at Sadaf who met her eyes briefly and gave a little shrug. He was a lot less certain about Kanan then she was but she still wanted to at least try this partnership out. She had _liked_ Kanan. It wasn't fair.

"So, is I'm on the crew?"

"Yeah."

Kanan met her eyes for the first time since he nearly walked out of the hanger. He jerked his head in an approximation of a nod and grabbed the rat-droid away from where Sadaf had turned her upside down and was sniffing her, and lifted the bag. "Where should I dump this stuff then?"

"I'll show you!" Hera said. She abandoned her half-finished tea and Sadaf scurried up her arm led Kanan to the crew quarters. It wasn't much, bare metal walls and sturdy cots, but it _was_ hers. She grinned as she let her fingers trail on the wall. No, The Ghost might not be a pleasure cruiser but once the _real_ tour started she was prepared to see Kanan's jaw drop.


End file.
